Caracas, Apr 10: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Wednesday promised to give India more oilfields in its heavy-oil belt, touted to hold the world's largest fossil fuel reserves, as he seeks to tap the world's second fastest growing economy to diversify energy trade beyond US.

The 53-year-old leader, who proudly calls Venezuelans as Indians, indicated that the Latin America's only OPEC member- nation may set up a refinery-cum-petrochemical complex in India to process its crude oil.

Receiving India's Petroleum Minister Murli Deora at his Presidential Palace Hugo Rafael Chavez Frias expressed intention to supply one million barrels per day of oil to India in the near future. He readily agreed to Deora's request for giving India's flagship ONGC Videsh Ltd a stake in one of the four oilfields in the Carabobo and a piece in the Junin Norte Block in the Orinoco heavy-oil basin.

"The political answer is yes," he said, responding to Deora's request. "Now technical team (of Venezuelan national oil company PdVSA) will deal with technical aspects and I am certain even technical aspects will be positive," he told visiting Indian journalists after a 75-minute meeting with the Indian oil minister, the first to visit his country.

The Junin area is believed to hold some 500 billion barrels of inplace oil reserves, of which Junin Norte may have about 7-8 billion barrels. The Carabobo heavy-oil field also in the Orinoco region may hold 213 billion barrels. About 10 to 20 per cent of these reserves can be recovered.

These would be in addition to the 40 per cent share OVL has in the San Cristobal oilfield for which an agreement was signed on Tuesday. OVL and its 60 per cent partner Petroleos de Venezuela S.A (PdVSA) plan to produce 40,000 barrels per day of oil from the field over an 8-year plateau period after investing over 446 million dollars.